Singapore based Nektar.ai raises US$2.15 mn in seed funding to build an "AI-powered GTM collaboration engine for modern revenue teams"
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| L-R Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, Aravind Ravi Sulekha |
A clutch of high profile individual investors like Anand Chandrasekaran (EVP at Five9), Ganesh Lakshminarayanan (CEO, Enterprise Business at Airtel), Vinod Muthukrishnan (Chief Growth Officer, CCBU at Cisco), Venkat Tadanki (Ex-Founder/Board Member at IBM Daksh) and Aneesh Reddy (Co-founder & CEO at Capillary Technologies) also participated in the funding round.
Nektar.ai was founded earlier this year by seasoned SaaS sales leader, ex-President & MD APAC of Capillary Technologies, Abhijeet Vijayvergiya and third-time founder and ex-Zendesk tech leader Aravind Ravi Sulekha.
Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, Co-founder & CEO, said, "In the last decade the investment in sales tools globally has grown by 5 times but the average sales quota attainment has fallen 40%. According to Forbes, 57% of sales reps missed their numbers in 2018. At Nektar.ai we want to change this by reimagining the future of modern sales and building a first of its kind AI-driven sales productivity solution that will help the Go To Market revenue teams to seamlessly collaborate and make more sales reps successful in meeting their Quota."
And with over 40,000 B2B Sales teams globally and over 15 million sales professionals, the opportunity for the B2B Sales Productivity market is around US$8-10 Bn and growing. Nektar.AI is well-positioned to address this opportunity. It does this by connecting the world of unstructured data like emails, calendar, Linkedin, Zoom to the world of CRM and overlays the same with the organization's best practices and sales playbooks. This helps even the average reps to learn and perform alongside the high performers in their sales teams.
"Nektar.ai is filling a key gap that exists in how revenue teams operate: a collaboration platform that captures and leverages the collective experience and intelligence of the Go To Market teams and helps in operationalizing the best practices and winning sales playbooks. We are thrilled to partner with Abhijeet and Aravind toward building Nektar into a remarkable company," said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners who has been an early investor at companies like Postman, Rancher Labs, Druva.
Yinglan Tan, Founding Managing Partner at Insignia Ventures Partners, added, "We are excited for Abhijeet and his team as they build and grow Nektar.ai to be the leading SaaS company reinventing productivity and intelligence for revenue and Go To Market teams across South East Asia and the world."
"B2B Sales has not undergone a transformation for more than a decade and as a result, salespeople continue to work for the tools and not the other way round. It's about time that the vision of tools working for sales teams comes to life. I believe Nektar.ai is on a mission to accomplish that and supercharge the productivity of salespeople," said Vinod Muthukrishnan, Chief Growth Officer at Cisco.
Nektar's founding team has been initially working in stealth mode with a select list of early adopters and now plans to use the seed funding to further build out its platform and ramp up the engineering & product teams. It plans to open up its highly anticipated early access program for general availability later next year.